Shearwater make epic music, but not in the sense that so many contemporaries do. These aren't the heart-swelling crescendoes of an Explosions In The Sky or the wide-screen cinema of a Sigur Ros—it is epic not so much in sound, but in concept and gravity. Ever since leaving Will Sheff's Okkervil River to focus full-time on Shearwater, Jonathan Meiburg has made it clear that this music requires one hell of a stern emotional commitment. Whether through a fragile croon or thunderous bellow, Meiburg sings with the confident, beguiling strength of a preacher. He declares and testifies. It is a stance that, when combined with the always tastefully and patiently presented arrangements of his band, threatens to bog things down in a samey soup of midtempo sombreness. But, Meiburg has a style about him that lets Shearwater carry the day, and quite successfully, too. He is a man out of time, both in his chronological placement (he is definitely a classy old soul), and also in his perpetual sense of desperation. It is this desperation that provides the necessary bite to elevate The Golden Archipelago from navel-gazing dramatics to truly affecting human music.

Complementing the occasionally uncomfortable nakedness of their singer's delivery is a band whose direct approach never lets a song overstay its welcome. For all of their emotional weight, they wisely sidestep grossly overdone climaxes or loud-quiet-loud post-rock pitfalls. Sophisticated and eloquent, Shearwater understand inherently that our most personal moments are often the most difficult and embarrassing to share with others. With its meticulous delicacy and unflappable seriousness—not to mention a 72-page "dossier" in some versions—The Golden Archipelago is that friend that tells you its darkest secrets first, so that you'll feel more comfortable doing the same yourself in return.

It’s about 12:30 on a Wednesday in December 2008, usually a dead night anywhere, but Toronto’s Dakota Tavern is an exception to the rule. A band is quickly setting up after a parade of short sets by different acts as part of Jason Collett’s Basement Revue. Their name is Zeus. A friend and I discuss maybe going somewhere else to get a drink, but as the band launches into its first song, my friend and I stop talking to each other and gravitate to the stage like classic-rock-starved zombies. I hadn’t been that impressed with a band sight-unseen/sound-unheard in a long time.

Cut to February 2010: Zeus' debut album is out, and the tunes they played that night sound as fresh and catchy as I had remembered them. They might seem like an odd fit on such an indie-centric label as Arts & Crafts, but it’s that type of lateral thinking that has gained the label such notoriety. It’s easy to compare them to the Beatles or the Kinks, but what’s so bad about that? It‘s not easy to take such well-trod influences and make them your own. They also touch on some great hard rock riffs, occasionally married to southern rock comfort, along with the sort of group harmonies that you just don’t hear anymore. The fact that this group has three different singer-songwriters speaks volumes of their ability to work as one well-oiled cohesive unit. As their name implies, these aspiring gods of rock are getting their mythmaking off to a solid start.

(Zeus will be playing a free live in-store performance here at Soundscapes on Sat. Mar 6 @ 6pm.)

The fact that pop music is cyclical is no shock. But there's a big difference hearing bands like Wolfmother and Jet ape establishment acts like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, and hearing Yeasayer unearth the seemingly dead-and-buried jams of Tears For Fears and Level 42. OK, to be fair, throw Odd Blood on quickly, and the TV On The Radio meets early Flaming Lips of opener "The Children" doesn't apply. And on a whole, the record does display the same skittish, polyrhythmic adventurousness of contemporaries like Animal Collective. Let the record play, though, and not everything sounds so modern. But there's something about Yeasayer that keeps calling me back to the big emotion, open-armed pop of the 1980s, especially via Chris Keating's clear-toned and warmly-expressed vocals.

For someone who's still very eager to pull out The Hurting whenever the urge arises, this isn't really a bad thing. For all of its embracing of 'cold' technology, the '80s were often about dramatic, populist emotional gestures. Yeasayer hit this notion up for all it's worth, with choruses proclaiming "Stick up for yourself, son/Never mind what anybody else done". Is it uplifting? Corny? The group simply plays their hand and lets you figure that out.

The same goes for highlights like "O.N.E." and "Love Me Girl". Sonically, these songs are natural results of a recent decade that saw an entire pack of NYC bands—from The Rapture and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to LCD Soundsystem and Liars—offer their own theses on the lasting musical impact of the '80s. But as the source of these influences shifts further from groups that were always pretty cool to those that have been treated like lepers for ages, it's little like seeing a friend you thought was dead dancing in front for your face.

Which is really just a way of saying that the method by which these songs are delivered is so loaded taste-wise, it can be a little distracting. One wonders whether a slightly less obvious tact on the part of some of the music would've yielded a more timeless, individual album. But there's a lot more to Odd Blood than kitschy neon geometric patterns and acid-washed jeans—if you can sidestep those elements, the joyous, inventive Odd Blood is yours to enjoy freely.

Alan Sparhawk has built a career on understatement. Over the course of nearly two decades, he and wife Mimi Parker have steered their band Low on the quiet road less traveled. While there have been some flirtations with high decibel levels—namely 2005's The Great Destroyer—few bands can claim to have consistently embodied the aesthetics of patience and calm as well as they have. But it hasn't all been sweetness and light. Such attention to small details has allowed Low to construct moments of mammoth tension and resonant foreboding out of the slightest of materials. These dark moments (as well as Sparhawk's dirty blues project The Black-Eyed Snakes, and interviews wherein he relates a frustration with his guitar tones on Low records) have always hinted at a fierce heart beating under their calm skin.

So seeing Alan Sparhawk lead an honest-to-goodness rock band—one where all bets are off and volume knobs are cranked—is a little like turning a reluctant vegetarian loose in a burger barn. Retribution Gospel Choir finds him relishing every grain and crackle of an exceptional guitar tone that would make Neil Young proud. Indeed, much of 2 is so indebted to a meat-and-potatoes rock template (the indie BTO anthem "Workin' Hard", the motorcycle bar band of "White Wolf") that it takes a while to notice how he, bassist Sam Garrington (also of Low) and drummer Eric Pollard reshuffle the deck. The secret to Low's success (aside from Parker and Sparhawk's crystalline harmonizing, of course) was how they used a minimal template and glacial crawl to mask what were often quite agreeable pop songs. RGC is a similar principle but in reverse—a fairly average rock template puts a comfortable face on what are some thorny, ornery tunes. Even a track as radio-ready as the triumphantly buoyant "Hide It Away" is accompanied by what sound like actual detonations deep in the mix—y'know, like, bombs going off. It's a trick used on a few other tracks, almost a subliminal reminder that these ain't your daddy's three-chord brew-hoisters.

But then again, they kind of are—unlike his day job, much of RGC could be played for a classic rock crowd without raising much of an eyebrow. This is thick, power-trio rock that's very smartly and passionately played, and which compliments—rather than confuses—Low’s catalogue. Songs like "Poor Man's Daughter" and the clearly named "Electric Guitar" are reckoning epics where Sparhawk's grumpy eloquence really gets to shine, as does the incredible communication these three musicians share. Of course, I am saying this on the back of having seen the trio recently play the Drake. It was an incredible show, reinforcing that this band isn't some winking lark for Sparhawk ("Hey guys, wouldn't it be funny if...?"). And while, the band is still shy of bringing the intensity of their live show to a record, 2 is an improvement in every way over what was a solid debut. They're for real, that's for sure. 

My first real exposure to this Baltimore-based duo was an opening set during Grizzly Bear's tour for the latter's Friend EP. Gentle and tranquil with a hint of spookiness, their drum machine, organ and guitar slo-mo tunes were the perfect fit for the night. A little too perfect maybe. Even with tons of accolades from peers and critics, there was something about Beach House that appeared to relegate them to opening-for-cool-bands-who-were-bigger-than-them status. So much for that theory.

Teen Dream completely eradicates the band's past timidness, while managing to retain the group's "character actor" appeal. It's a feat that many before have tried, but few can claim to have pulled it off as suavely as this. The arrangements are bigger, but still stay simple and clean. Victoria Legrand's vocals remain woozy and hazy, but when required are now able to strike out with heartbreaking force—moments here pack the kind of punch normally reserved for Stevie Nicks at her most emotive. "It is happening again," she intones in the chorus of "Silver Soul" in the manner of so many of the best sad songs; the kind where the "it" can be whatever you want it to be.

This is really the heart of the record's beauty—whether on the widescreen cruiser "10 Mile Stereo", the skyward searching "Norway", or the pledging waltz "Take Care", Beach House pin specific emotions onto ambiguous subjects with skillful ease. It's a heartbreak record. It's a falling-in-love record. It's a record to make curry to. It's there for you.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and you're right. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the bandwagon is on its way. Heck, it's already started and I'm on it. But Teen Dream truly is the kind of album that can turn casual well-wishers into genuine superfans in the blink of an eye—all without losing the superfans the group already had in the first place. And when that happens, all you can say is well-played, Beach House. Both figuratively and literally, well-played.

Since Spoon's minimalist reinvention via 2002's Kill The Moonlight (an album whose tracks could feature as little as mouth percussion, handclaps, and echo-laden vocals), this Portland/Austin-based band has gradually, but steadily, piled on the layers. Some of those layers have come courtesy of additional instruments, but just as many have arrived in the form of exhaustively nuanced studio edits. 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga saw Spoon's minute attention to detail join forces with their strongest and most richly-arranged tunes to that point. The result was a record whose charms feel as fresh today as they did at first listen—there is practically no end to the discoveries to be made.

The same can be said of their latest, Transference, with one notable exception—no hits. Whereas Ga was stacked with indie-pop gold, Transference offers no quick fixes. Even first single "Writing In Reverse" is too cryptically pissed-off with itself to look its listener in the eye. Instead, the record steps sideways deep into a world of jagged panning, meticulously raw instrumentation and fiercely-applied effects. It makes sense, then, that to truly understand its charms, you need to slap on a pair of headphones, stop asking questions, and just let it ride, which is exactly what this album so confidently does. Years of honing his craft has allowed singer Britt Daniel to become a master of inflection and subtle communication. Whether he's tough or tender, the man can turn the most oblique lyrics into a barrage of naked, relatable emotion. Likewise, the band—even when doing little more than jamming out a riff for three minutes—is equally fluent in sonic human language.

And that's really what's at the heart of Transference's gamble. Can Spoon—a band that is quite likely only another couple of killer tracks away from becoming "made"—ignore the pop hits and trust in their considerable talents to carry the day? It's enough to make an A&R man (assuming they even exist anymore) tear his hair out. Certainly, there's no question that a whole lot of people will initially meet this album with a shrug of disappointment, but Transference is that esoteric oddball whose acquaintance is well worth making. In effect, it's Moonlight Mk. II—although far denser, it is similarly about an album-wide studio aesthetic that makes the most of every moment. It's living proof that Spoon's self-confidence may be its greatest asset.